Even as a growing number of American teenagers and young adults are abusing opiates, only one in four of them are on medication to combat addiction, a new study suggests.
The proportion of Americans aged 13 to 25 diagnosed with opioid use disorders increased nearly six-fold between 2001 and 2014, researchers report in JAMA Pediatrics. During that period, the average annual rate of opioid use disorder among adolescents and young adults increased from 0.26 cases to 1.51 cases per 100,000 people.
Overall, only 27 percent of these young patients diagnosed with opiate use disorder were prescribed buprenorphine and naltrexone, two drugs to treat addiction, within six months of their diagnosis.
“Medications have been shown to treat withdrawal and cravings, and reduce relapse, and are an extremely effective component of treatment for opioid use disorder,” said Dr. Scott Hadland, a pediatrician and addiction specialist at the Boston Medical Center.
“Offering medications early in the life of addiction – particularly to patients with severe addiction – is critical to preventing damage from downstream addiction,” Hadland said via e-mail.
To assess the frequency with which young addicts receive drugs for opioid use disorders, Hadland and colleagues examined data on health insurance claims for 9.7 million young people between 2001 and 2014.
Overall, nearly 21,000 adolescents and young adults in the study, or about 0.2 percent, were diagnosed with opiate use disorder. About 5,600 of these young people received medication to treat their addiction.
Most who received the medicine received buprenorphine, an opioid that helps reduce cravings by attacking the same places in the brain that are affected by addictive opiates like heroin, morphine and codeine. A minority, about 11 percent, received naltrexone, a drug for alcohol and drug addiction.
The early years of the study coincided with the introduction of buprenorphine in 2002 and prescriptions for anti-addiction drugs for opiate use in adolescents and young adults increased more than 10-fold from 3 percent in 2002 to almost 32 Percent in 2009. But after that, prescriptions decreased even as addiction rates went up.
Younger adolescents, black and Hispanic women and youth were less likely to receive opioid-use medication than older men and whites, the study found.
One limitation of the study is that researchers lacked data on the severity of addiction, which may have influenced whether patients received medication, the authors write. Because the study only included people with private health insurance, it is also possible that the results will look different for young people with other benefits like Medicaid or who were not insured.
Still, the results underscore the importance of the 2016 American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations advising pediatricians to consider medication for adolescents with opioid addiction, said Brendan Saloner of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore In an accompaniment
